How Did HIV Start In South Africa
There is now conclusive evidence that HIV originated in Africa. A 10-year study completed in 2005 found a strain of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) in a number of chimpanzee colonies in south-east Cameroon that was a viral ancestor of the HIV-1 that causes AIDS in humans.
A complex computer model of the evolution of HIV-1 has suggested that the first transfer of SIV to humans occurred around 1930, with HIV-2 transferring from monkeys found in Guinea-Bissau, at some point in the 1940s .
Studies of primates in other continents did not find any trace of SIV, leading to the conclusion that HIV originated in Africa.
The 1960s- Early Cases Of AIDS
Experts studying the spread of the epidemic suggest that about 2,000 people in Africa may have been infected with HIV by the 1960s. Stored blood samples from an American malaria research project carried out in the Congo in 1959 prove one such example of early HIV infection.
The 1970s – The First AIDS Epidemic
It was in Kinshasa in the 1970s that the first epidemic of HIV/AIDS is believed to have occurred. The emerging epidemic in the Congolese capital was signalled by a surge in opportunistic infections, such as cryptococcal meningitis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, tuberculosis and specific forms of pneumonia.
It is speculated that HIV was brought to the city by an infected individual who travelled from Cameroon by river down into the Congo. On arrival in Kinshasa, the virus entered a wide urban sexual network and spread quickly. The world’s first heterosexually-spread HIV epidemic had begun.
The 1980s – Spread And Reaction
Although HIV was probably carried into Eastern Africa (Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Kenya) in the 1970s from its western equatorial origin, it did not reach epidemic levels in the region until the early 1980s .
Once HIV was established rapid transmission rates in the eastern region made the epidemic far more devastating than in West Africa, particularly in areas bordering Lake Victoria. The accelerated spread in the region was due to a combination of widespread labour migration, high ratio of men in the urban populations, low status of women, lack of circumcision, and prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases9 . It is thought that sex workers played a large part in the accelerated transmission rate in East Africa; in Nairobi for example, 85 percent of sex workers were infected with HIV by 1986 .
Uganda was hit very hard by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. At the beginning of the decade, doctors were confronted by a surge in cases of a severe wasting disease known locally as ‘slim disease’, alongside a large number of fatal opportunistic infections such as Kaposi’s sarcoma. By this time doctors were aware of AIDS cases with similar symptoms in the United States:
‘But we just could not connect a disease in white, homosexual males in San Francisco to the thing that we were staring at…’ David Serwadda, former medical resident at the Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala .
After the initial clinical recognition of the link between ‘slim disease’ and AIDS, research was initiated to discover transmission patterns, risk factors, and the prevalence of HIV in Uganda. By the end of the decade HIV prevalence amongst pregnant women in Uganda’s capital had peaked at over 30 percent
